For years I have been a writer, an editor and a teacher of creative writing. Now I want to share some of what I have learned along the way. Write On The Fringes is a blog about the dangers, the disappointments and the rewards of writing. It's a record of the writing of a novel, from the tantalising first inklings of an idea, through to the final draft. But above all it's an exploration of the art and the craft of writing and the nature of story, as well as a search for the essence of creativity and the complex nature of truth.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Imagination And Memory: A Creative Tension

'Imagination
is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is
that. He dared to imagine everything.'

Henry
Miller

I don't
plan before I write. Instead I start with an image that haunts me and
perhaps a theme or two then see what emerges. The word imagination
comes from the Latin word imago, which means image. According to
psychologist, Robert Johnson, in his book, Inner Work, 'the
imagination is the image-forming faculty in the mind. . .it generates
the symbols the unconscious uses to express itself' Imagination is
vital for creative life, for abstract thought, for the development of
the sciences, philosophy, religion and even language. As Catherine
Ann Jones wrote in The Way of Story, 'images are the language
of the soul', yet in popular modern terms the role of the imagination
has been denigrated, coming to mean something fictitious or a
daydream and often labelled as mere fantasy.

The
word fantasy is derived from the Greek word phantasia which meant 'a
making visible'. For the Greeks, phantasia was much more than a
daydream, it was, as Johnson wrote, 'the organ by which the divine
world spoke to the human mind'. For me too, the image making faculty
is far more than mere fantasy. Einstein believed that 'imagination is
more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now
know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and
all there ever will be to know and understand'. I too believe that
the imagination is perhaps the greatest gift humanity has been given.
Its only limits are the ones we place upon it and ourselves.

Imagination
is what makes us human, enabling us to experience events and emotions
we might not normally experience, to reflect, to find commonality
with others and thus understand ourselves. As writers we can imagine
fictional characters and in so doing, reveal and discover something
about ourselves and others, for as Lousie DeSalvo explained in The
Healing Power of Story, 'storytelling teaches us or reteaches us
empathy. This trait is a prerequisite for treating others well but it
depends upon our ability to imagine what it feels like to be another
person. We do this through storytelling.'

Imagination
is like the trickster gods of old - a powerful liberating force,
cutting through what has been established, making strange what is
normal, allowing us to step into the shoes of another, to break free
of what we know and to fly. And yet, Carmel Bird says in Dear Writer,
'the worlds of the imagination are constructed from the things we
find in the everyday world'. Bird distinguishes between this everyday
world and the imaginative world of 'other possibilities' but says
there is no conflict between them, that the writer must give
permission to the imagination to 'rearrange the building blocks of
everyday reality'. Therefore the writing process is about taking the
familiar and making it strange, letting the imagination create
something new from what is known and thus venture into the realms of
the unknown.

Imagination
is not solely responsible for the mystery and magic of writing.
Memory too, plays an important role. The word memory, comes from the
Greek word Mnemosyne. Born from the marriage of Uranus and Gaia,
heaven and earth, Mnemosyne was personified as the mother of the nine
muses and the patron goddesses of poets. Fiction writers spend a
great deal of time inhabiting the world of the imagination, but also
draw heavily on memory, for as Jones writes, 'memory is one of the
primal sources for creative images'. I am fascinated by the memories
we carry (often unconsciously) and the way they arise in the process
of storytelling, make links between seemingly disparate ideas and
provide significance and revelation. In the process of writing, a
tension is created between the grounding nature of memory and the
flightiness of the imagination. For me, the vitality of that tension
creates meaning. It is the source of my stories. Trusting it, is an
act of faith in the unfolding mystery of story. In The Creative
Writing Coursebook, Lesley Glaister writes that 'memory is
refracted through imagination, often unconsciously, into something
new.' That, she says, is 'the real stuff of fiction memory blended,
refracted, transformed.'

As I
write, I work closely with the unconscious; In the process I take my
own memories and recreate them, usually in a fictional way, finding
links and themes and connoting meaning through metaphor. 'Memory is a
poet, explains Patti Miller in Writing Your Life, it stores
'experiences in imaginative patterns. . . connections are made
through imaginative association rather than logic.' Miller goes on
to distinguish between the left and right sides of the brain,
suggesting that when people try to write from the logical left part
of their mind, their stories become dull and flat, whereas the right
side of the brain is where the imagination and poetry lie. As
Einstein once said, 'logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will
take you everywhere.'

In her
novel, Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels writes that 'the
memories we elude catch up to us, overtake us like a shadow. A truth
appears suddenly in the middle of a thought, a hair on a lens'. This
is how my memories arose while I was writing Flight;
spontaneously, from the right side of the brain, overtaking me with
sudden revelations. At first the memories seemed random and out of
context, so I was tempted to ignore them. Instead I decided to trust
the creative process, so I took the bare facts and used my
imagination to expand each memory and link it with my protagonist,
Fern. Only then did I receive the gift that always comes with this
connection, the hidden revelation, an understanding of its
significance. For it is memory that helps us identify the patterns in
our lives and imagination that helps us to interpret them. 'How we
remember,' writes Jones 'is how we give meaning to a life lived.'.

As more
of my memories arose and were given to Fern, I wondered if by giving
my memories away I was in a sense emptying myself and in so doing,
might in some way lose myself. In his book, Creativity, Osho
distinguishes between psychological and factual memory, stating that
factual memory is necessary but psychological memory is not. 'Factual
memory,' he says, 'is not a problem, it is pure remembrance. When you
become psychologically affected by it, then the problem arises'. I
realised then, that this was the essence of the journeys many of us
take when writing, particularly about trauma or pain. The result is a
clearing of our emotional attachment to these memories. We still have
them, and yet in writing them we release ourselves from their spell
or 'curse' and thus the identity they had constructed. In writing
about memories in this way, we evoke our imaginations to transform
them and thus liberate ourselves from them, not lose ourselves in
them. In the end though, whether it be fiction or memoir and no
matter what reasons we draw on memory in our writing, memory is a
rich and authentic source of material for writers, helping us to
create credible characters, settings and back story. It is memory
that grounds our stories, while imagination gives our stories the
wings they need to soar.Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

About Me

I am the author of two novels. 'Flight' was published by Fourth Estate in February 2012 and 'Gathering Storm' was published in 2008 and has since been published in audio form and in the Netherlands. My short fiction and travel writing have been published in Australia and the UK.
I work as a Creative Writing Fellow at Aberystwyth University in Wales and also teach on the online MA in Writing programme at Swinburne University, Melbourne.
I grew up in Adelaide before moving to Sydney and then the UK where I completed an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. I completed a PhD at Swinburne University, researching the origins of stories and their role in human evolution.